Dear PPI & cj,
It is with pleasure that I announce the _CADRE Library_.
We've got the shiny new shelves all in place, organized according to our
outline for "Globalization and the Revolutionary Imperative". (See below)
Only a few documents have been placed on the shelves as yet.
I invite you take a look at this article which Elisabet Sahtouris has
graciously allowed us to place in our library. And please take a browse
around and checkout the shelves before they get cluttered...
rkm
btw> If you have material you'd like to contribute to the library, please
send it in to <•••@••.•••> along with a note about
who wrote it, whether it's been published before, etc. etc.
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CADRE Library
- a public service of CADRE (Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance) -
"The Biology of Globalization"
Copyright 1997 by Elisabet Sahtouris
http://cyberjournal.org/.../Biology-of-Globalization.txt
CADRE home page -> http://cyberjournal.org
PPI home page -> http://cyberjournal.org/cadre/PPI-archives
CADRE library home page -> http://cyberjournal.org/cadre/cadre-library
- Republication permission granted for
NON-COMMERCIAL use only,
with all sig & header info incorporated, please.
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http://cyberjournal.org/
cadre/cadre-library/
( "Globalization and the Revolutionary Imperative" )
I-Globalism-as-it-is/
1-Capitalism-and-nation-state/
2-Roots-of-globalism/
3-The-globalist-program/
4-The-New-World-Order/
II-Envisioning-a-sane-world/
1-Sustainable-societies/
##------> Biology-of-Globalization.txt
2-Consensus-democracy/
3-Reform-agenda/
4-World-as-community/
III-Revolutionary-Imperative/
1-Seeds-of-revolution/
2-Revolutionary-consciousness/
3-Engaging-the-elite-regime/
4-The-Democratic-Renaissance/
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Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D. is an evolution biologist, futurist and
UN consultant on indigenous peoples. Author of Gaia and
EarthDance, and co-author with Willis Harman of the forthcoming
Biology Revisioned, she lectures widely in Europe, North, South
and Central America. She can be reached by e-mail: •••@••.•••
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"The Biology of Globalization"
Copyright 1997 by Elisabet Sahtouris
<•••@••.•••>
www.ratical.com/lifeweb
Previously published:
Perspectives on Business and Global Change,
the World Business Academy journal, Sept 1997.
Reprints available from the editor:
Maya Porter <•••@••.•••>
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How many citizens of the WTO's seventy member nations are aware that
their "democratic" congresses voted away the sovereignty of their
nations by agreeing to uphold the provisions of the WTO, which can meet
in secret and challenge any laws made at any level in our nation, our
state, county or city that are deemed to conflict with its
interests?... Under WTO rules, for example, Ralph Nader points out that
"certain objectives are forbidden to all domestic... including
[objectives such as] providing any significant subsidies to promote
energy conservation, sustainable farming practices, or environmentally
sensitive technologies."
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"The human being of the West has abandoned being human and has
turned himself into an individual... community has died in them."
-- Nicolas Aguilar Sayritupac, Aymara Indian, Lake Titicaca,
Bolivia
"Anyone who knows how to run a household, knows how to run the
world."
-- Xilonem Garcia, a Meshika elder in Mexico
"Survival means the survival of humankind as a whole, not just a
part of it.... If the South cannot survive, the North is going to
crumble. If countries of the Third World cannot pay their debts,
you are going to suffer here in the North. If you do not take care
of the Third World, your well-being is not going to last, and you
will not be able to continue living in the way you have been for
much longer."
-- Thich Nat Han, "The Heart of Understanding"
---------------------------------
From the vantage point of a macrobiologist-- a human species
watcher-- it's encouraging to see the swell of interest in, even
fervor for, a global human community with more equitable and less
ecologically destructive economics. I rejoice that the words
"community" and "communal values" are back in our vocabulary now
that the Soviet stigma has been removed from them. As the Aymara
Indian quoted above observed, we have suffered greatly from their
absence. The big question is whether we can restore community and
communal values before all is lost.
As an evolutionary biologist, I see globalization as natural,
inevitable, and even desirable, as I hope to show. It is already
well on its way and is not a reversible process. We are doing some
aspects of it cooperatively and well, to wit our global telephone,
postal and air travel systems, but the most central and important
aspect of globalization, its economics, are currently being done
in a manner that threatens the demise of our whole civilization.
For this reason, we must become more conscious participants in the
process, rather than letting a handful of powerful players lead us
all to doom.
Fortunately life is resilient, and we are witnessing a growing
storm of protest along with some quieter discussions of economic
globalization. These are healthy reactions that can help lead us
to survival. Their common features lie in the recognition that
communal values have been overridden in a dangerous process that
sets vast profits for a tiny human minority above all other human
interests. Most of those looking at the problems of market-driven
capitalism are aware on some level that the measure of human
success must shift from money to wellbeing for all, and that to do
this communal values must be reclaimed and acted upon in a way
that ensures a balance of local interests and the global interests
we share with each other and all other species.
The evolutionary process never goes well until individual,
communal, ecosystemic and planetary interests are met
simultaneously and reasonably harmoniously. This is an aspect of
biological evolution which has unfortunately not gained
prominence, and is therefore not in our meme (social gene) bank.
My purpose is to help put it there, for we humans, however
spiritual we can also be, are inescapably biological creatures and
could benefit greatly from the lessons already learned in the four
and a half billion year improvisational dance we call evolution.
The Wake-up Call:
To see why the current course of globalization cannot continue and
must be changed to a healthier one, we need to look at the
inherent contradictions between what we have euphemistically
called "free market capitalism" (in fact an incipient global
totalitarian capitalism) and what we should have: a democratic and
ecologically sound economic system. I want to discuss this
fundamental contradiction from a biological perspective, but let's
look first at the pattern of growing opposition to corporate
globalization without representation.
Such opposition has long had a grassroots character in the United
States, with recent developments such as the Green Party drafting
Ralph Nader as its presidential candidate and the populist
Citizens Alliance that sprang up in response to Ronnie Dugger's "A
Call to Citizens: Real Populists Please Stand Up" (The Nation,
Aug. 14/21 1995). But it also now includes some very respectable
capitalist system professionals, to wit Paul Hawken (The Ecology
of Commerce, Harper 1993), Herman Daly of the World Bank with John
Cobb (For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward
Community, the Environment and a Sustainable Future, Beacon 1994)
and David Korten, with his Harvard Business School faculty, USAID
and Ford Foundation credentials (When Corporations Rule the World,
Kumarian 1995).
Some capitalist entrepreneurs are uniting with each other to work
out ways of doing alternative and responsible-to-community
capitalism in such organizations as The World Business Academy,
Business for Social Responsibility, the Social Ventures Network
and the Conscious Business Alliance. A significant body of
intelligent and respectable critics have gathered together in the
San Francisco-based International Forum on Globalization (IFG),
which has now published a volume of some forty essays on the
subject (The Case Against the Global Economy and For a Return to
the Local, edits. Mander & Goldsmith, Sierra Books 1996).
But of all the recruits to this cause, the most surprising are two
multi-multi-billionaires drawn from the biggest winners in the
global casino of cyberspace money created by the corporate
capitalism they now oppose: Sir James Goldsmith and George Soros.
Sir James, in a London Times article of 1994 (March 5) pondered on
"What an astonishing thing it is to watch a civilization destroy
itself because it is unable to re-examine the validity, under
totally new circumstances, of an economic ideology." Soros, some
three years later, warns us of "The Capitalist Threat" as the
cover article of the February (1997) Atlantic Monthly. Hardly the
first to point out the sacrifice of communal values to market
values, they must nevertheless be heralded as the most convincing
critics of bigtime corporate capitalism to date. As Robert Kuttner
wrote in the Los Angeles Times on January 27-- "When a man who
makes billions by understanding markets warns of their excesses,
even the most ardent defenders of pure capitalism should pay
attention."
In Soros' own words: "Although I have made a fortune in the
financial markets, I now fear that the untrammeled intensification
of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into
all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society.
The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the
communist but the capitalist threat."
In brief, a loud and clear wake-up call is being heard in the
land!
Communism vs capitalism?
Let's look back for a moment at "the communist threat." Seen
through the lenses of my worldview as a biologist, the
capitalist/communist drama that played out for most if not all of
our lifetimes reveals a fundamental dramatic flaw. We played our
own roles in it by buying into an odd and ultimately impossible
ideological choice: to build society on the basis of individual
interest or on the basis of communal interest.
Or?
Whatever labels we give to the human econo-political systems of
various times and places, I think we can all agree they are living
systems. If we see them that way, this either/or choice makes no
sense. A living system can only maintain its health while there is
a balance of interests between parts and whole, between
individuals and community. To sacrifice one to the other would
kill the system, as it did Soviet communism, and as Soros warns us
could happen as well with capitalism. He points out that in
nature, "Cooperation is as much a part of the system as
competition" and again, "The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism
holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited
pursuit of self-interest." But unless self-interest is "tempered
by a recognition of a common interest," the society, on which the
market rests, "is liable to break down."
In practice, it turned out, there was more in common between the
two systems than the surface ideology indicated. Alvin Toffler was
the first author I recall talking about parallels between the
Soviet East and the Capitalist West: both, he pointed out, were
unfairly exploiting the Third World to support their large
industrialist economies (The Third Wave, William Collins, London
1980). Now David Korten goes further, in the IFG (International
Forum on Globalization) volume of essays, telling us "that a
modern economic system based on the ideology of free market
capitalism is destined to self-destruct for many of the same
reasons that the Marxist economy collapsed in Eastern Europe and
the former Soviet Union." He spells out these common features as
1) the concentration of economic power in unaccountable and
abusive centralized institutions (state or transnational
corporations); 2) the destruction of ecosystems in the name of
progress; 3) the erosion of social capital by dependence on
disempowering megainstitutions; and 4) narrow views of human needs
by which community values and spiritual connection to the Earth
are eroded.
Note that all of these illustrate systems in which the "top" level
is empowered by disempowering local and individual levels. We are
accustomed to understanding this about communist systems, but we
have ignored the erosion of our own democratic principles in the
process of capitalist globalization.
Globalization by NAFTA ,GATT and the WTO:
Also in the IFG volume, democratic activist Ralph Nader and
attorney Lori Wallach show very clearly how the institutions of
global corporate totalitarianism evolved from the World Bank and
IMF to NAFTA, GATT and the WTO, which were established with very
little understanding by anyone outside the ranks of their elitist
architects. When, for example, the U.S. Congress was about to cast
the vote that would establish the Uruguay version of GATT and the
WTO, Nader offered ten thousand dollars to any member who had read
the proposed 500-page agreement and could answer ten simple
questions about it. No one accepted. Only on his second call,
during a postponement of the vote, did he get one taker: Colorado
Republican Hank Brown, who changed his vote to oppose the
agreements after reading them!
How many citizens of the WTO's seventy member nations are aware
that their "democratic" congresses voted away the sovereignty of
their nations by agreeing to uphold the provisions of the WTO,
which can meet in secret and challenge any laws made at any level
in our nation, our state, county or city that are deemed to
conflict with its interests?
Let us be absolutely clear: the objectives of the WTO have nothing
to do with the wellbeing of the human community. It was set up by
a handful of players who have now succeeded in gaining control of
a process designed to enrich a very small handful of humans at the
expense of all the rest. Nader and Wallach emphasize that the WTO
is a permanent and legal structure the binding provisions of which
"do not incorporate any environmental, health, labor or human
rights considerations. Moreover there is nothing in the
institutional principles of the WTO to inject any procedural
safeguards of openness, participation, or accountability. ... and
in several provisions, requires that documents and proceedings
remain confidential."
All the WTO's member states authorize the WTO to do their business
negotiations. All are bound by its decisions and can be forced to
change any of their own present or future laws if, as the WTO
provisions read , "the attainment of any [WTO] objective is being
impeded" by its existence. The trade dispute panels of the WTO and
NAFTA do not guarantee members' economic disinterest. Further,
they keep all their proceedings, documents and transcripts secret.
There cannot be any media or citizen participation, and no review
or appeal is available.
So, Thailand has been told it cannot refuse to import US
cigarettes for health reasons, and Indonesia may not keep the
rattan it needs for domestic use. Neither children nor adults are
protected from exploitative and unhealthy conditions of labor, and
no member country may make any effort to protect its local
industry and employment against erosion by unfair competition in
the world market. Self-sufficient organic farming is literally
outlawed, while poisonous chemicals are forced on countries,
destroying the health of people, crops, land, air and water for
the sake of short-term profits in high places.
We have given away democracy, community, health and wellbeing, all
unnecessarily. We were not paying attention when our
congresspeople were voting. Although we could have gotten hold of
those agreements and we could have sorted through those 500
closely printed pages, we assumed we were living in a democracy
that our elected representatives would uphold and that they, whose
job it is, were paying attention.
We might also have expected that public media would have informed
us more responsibly of what may be the most important set of
events in all human history. But then, the media is globalized in
this same process.
Maria Gilardin of TUC Radio, one of very few truly independent
radio producers in the USA, after airing her 1992 series on GATT
and the creation of the WTO, said " I thought this would be a huge
debate, that everybody would be passionately discussing the GATT,
but it was the biggest silence I ever heard in the media." Yet,
she adds, the head of the World Economic Forum, which was one of
the architects of the GATT and of economic globalization, was
quoted in an International Herald Tribune editorial as saying:
"Corporations should start taking the backlash against
globalization seriously." The editorial warned: "Globalization is
causing severe economic dislocation and social instability,"
adding that this backlash could turn into open political revolt
that could destabilize the Western democracies.
Lessons of Nature:
Soros describes the profound influence that Karl Popper's 1945
book, The Open Society and its Enemies, had on his life. Popper
proposed a society that could resist all forms of totalitarianism
by an open, peaceful dialogue of ideas and interests in the
recognition that "nobody has a monopoly on the truth," with
institutions "that protect the rights of citizens and ensure
freedom of choice and freedom of speech"-- institutions, I might
add, that would help us achieve our precious dream of "life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Good ideas, sounding as though they were straight out of our own
Declaration of Independence and Constitution. What ever happened
to those ideas?
We can see more clearly what is going on if we understand the
individual, the community, the nation and global human society as
living systems embedded within each other, like Russian nested
dolls or Chinese boxes. Arthur Koestler had an elegant terminology
for this concept: holons in holarchies (Janus: A Summing Up, Pan
Books, London 1978). The fundamental flaw in both communist and
capitalist systems is the subjugation of local holon interests
(individual and community) to national and global holon interests,
however much we in the West were ideologically taught that our
individual wellbeing was primary and our democracy good for our
communities.
(continued...)
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